Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch Worries Researchers

NeverVotedBush writes with an update to a story we discussed early this month about an enormous accumulation of garbage and plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean, a thousand miles off the coast of California. The team of scientists has now returned from their expedition to examine the area and say they "found much more debris than they expected." The team will start running tests on the samples they retrieved, and they are preparing to visit another section of ocean they suspect will be full of trash. "The Scripps team hopes the samples they gathered during the trip nail down answers to questions of the trash's environmental impact. Does eating plastic poison plankton? Is the ecosystem in trouble when new sea creatures hitchhike on the side of a water bottle? Plastics have entangled birds and turned up in the bellies of fish, and one paper cited by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates 100,000 marine mammals die trash-related deaths each year. The scientists hope their data gives clues as to the density and extent of marine debris, especially since the Great Pacific Garbage Patch may have company in the Southern Hemisphere, where scientists say the gyre is four times bigger. 'We're afraid at what we're going to find in the South Gyre, but we've got to go there,' said Tony Haymet, director of the Scripps Institution."

Comments

Re:Earth Plus Plastic.

[joocemann]

..... to learn something.

He is quoting a comedian for basis/guidance on serious issues. That cannot be good.

My understanding is that it is the desert

[SuperKendall]

If this were happening in a "desert" location, it would probably be insignificant. Unfortunately it's not. It's happening where currents naturally draw things together. Things like food.

But it's exactly that - a desert.

First of all, Gyres are not caused by ocean currents (at least not this one) - they are caused by air currents.

Secondly, there really was not much there anyway - from How Stuff Works:

The area is an oceanic desert, filled with tiny phytoplankton but few big fish or mammals.

So as you see, you have it exactly right - it is happening in a desert, which is why it may not matter as much as they are making out. In fact the ocean is doing a damn good job of collecting crap which would otherwise be all over the place, and concentrating it exactly where it can do the least harm.

A counter might be it gets into the food chain through the tiniest organisms - but if the plastic all ends up here without escaping, how would the organisms? At least in any great quantity....

We should probably try to figure out how to clean it up, but it's not as bad as the hype is trying to lead you to believe.

Re:Are you going to believe your eyes, or our stor

[petrus4]

Judge the quality of the "science" here for yourself. If you're a critical thinker, it should be apparent that this isn't science at all...it's just another story of human waste.

So I take it, that that means that we don't need to bother cleaning it up at all. Maybe filling the ocean up with more garbage would actually be a better idea?